In this week’s article for the American Interest, Anders Åslund, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, argues that a return to the “Kremlinology” approach to analyzing Russian politics may prove useful at a time when the political landscape is becoming increasingly opaque. Åslund defines Kremlinology as “the formalized study of hard facts in a closed society, observing appointments, organization, decrees, and formal speeches.” This approach, now seen as a relic of Cold War era Russian Studies, could help Western policymakers and experts interpret the unexpected and often mysterious appointments and dismissals that have taken place over the past few years in the upper echelons of the Russian power structure. The author points out that recent photographs of top-level Kremlin meetings suggest a protocol resembling the strict fashion in which senior Soviet officials would arrange themselves by rank during governmental engagements, and that this protocol could in fact tell us more about the status of Putin’s ruling party than Kremlin propaganda would have us know. Åslund suggests that through the lens of Kremlinology, Russia’s Security Council could effectively oust Putin, and that the significance of this institution is often ignored by Western analysts. In an atmosphere of perpetual disinformation, could a return to Kremlinology be the key to understanding who governs whom in Putin’s Russia?

Staunton, August 26 -- The flood of news stories from a country as large, diverse and strange as the Russian Federation often appears to be is far too large for anyone to keep up with. But there needs to be a way to mark those which can’t be discussed in detail but which are too indicative of broader developments to ignore.

Consequently, Windows on Eurasia presents a selection of 13 of these other and typically neglected stories at the end of each week. This is the 46thsuch compilation. It is only suggestive and far from complete – indeed, once again, one could have put out such a listing every day -- but perhaps one or more of these stories will prove of broader interest.

5.Moscow Says US Sent Genetically Modified ‘Mutants’ to Olympics.A Russian defense ministry official explains the US victories at Rio by saying that the American team included genetically modified “mutants” specially designed for victory (tvzvezda.ru/news/201608221615-81mu.htm/content/201608241747-ru46.htm). Meanwhile, in another Olympic story, many Russian outlets complained that the plane carrying the Russian team was detained for some hours on the tarmac of the Rio airport. What was not reported except in social media was that there was a problem: the Russian team failed to see that it could get its super-sized matryoshka doll on board by taking it apart (facebook.com/roma.lisovich?fref=nf&pnref=story.unseen-section).

6.Russia Must Combat the Spread of English in Russia and Abroad.A Russian commentator says that the spread of English around the world is anything but a natural phenomenon and that Moscow must set as one of its most important tasks blocking the spread of English first and foremost within Russia but also in other countries as well (ruskline.ru/analitika/2016/08/24/yazykovuyu_politiku_dolzhny_opredelyat_ideologi/).

8.Moscow Tells Parents of Soldiers Killed in Syria Their Children Died in the North Caucasus. To hide the number of Russian combat deaths in Syria, Russian officials are telling the parents of those who died there than in fact their sons died in the North Caucasus – even when parents know that their sons were not serving there (newsader.com/29546-kreml-vydaet-gibel-rossiyskikh-sold/).

9.Russian Politics Gets Really Down and Dirty.Those who don’t like the reporting of journalists like Yuliya Latynina are now using a new tactic against them: throwing fecal materials at them in the streets of Moscow (graniru.org/Society/Media/m.253898.html).

11.Volgograd Officials Ready to Rename Airport There ‘Stalingrad.’Officials in the former city of Tsaritsyn, then Stalingrad, and now Volgograd say they are ready to rename the airport there in honor of the late Soviet dictator, something that has sparked both expressions of support and outbursts of anger (slon.ru/posts/72401).(7x7-journal.ru/post/85886).Meanwhile, in Oryol, a scandal is brewing because officials apparently manipulated poll results in order to suggest that people there really wanted a statue of Ivan the Terrible when in fact it appears likely that most don't(7x7-journal.ru/post/85886).

3.Kerch Bridge Won’t Last Even If It is Built, Ukrainian Expert Says.Even if Moscow does manage to build the Kerch bridge to Crimea, something that is far from certain, a Ukrainian engineer says, the bridge will almost certainly be destroyed by the actions of currents in the waters there (focus.ua/world/348338/).

5.‘Armenian-Russian Friendship Museum Must Be Renamed Because Armenian-Russian Friendship Doesn’t Exist.’ Yerevan residents say that the museum devoted to Armenian-Russian friendship in their city must be renamed because such friendship does not now exist (ru.1in.am/1163352.html).

6.‘World Fears Russia Not Because It is Strong But Because It is Insane,’ Landsbergis Says.Lithuanian independence leader Vytautas Landsbergis says that it is important for both Russia and the world to understand that “the world now fears Russia not because it is strong but because it is insane” (tvrain.ru/teleshow/interview/landsbergis-415649/).At least some Russians agree: Samara residents want their governor examined by a psychiatrist after his recent claims about a CIA conspiracy directed against that oblast (club-rf.ru/63/news/43030).

Staunton, August 26 – Moscow propagandists have long insisted that Ukrainians became hostile to Russia as a result of what they say was the Western-organized Maidan, but sociological research clearly shows that it was not the Maidan but rather subsequent Russian aggression that caused Ukrainians to change their attitude toward Russia and Russians.

Ukrainians now view Russians as an enemy rather than as a fraternal people, a dramatic shift that was highlighted this week by President Petro Poroshenko’s remarks on Ukrainian Independence Day and that has been documented by Ukrainian sociologists and other scholars in recent studies and polls.

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has transformed the situation, Magda continues, “and it is important for Ukraine to show to the rest of the world that in fact it was a colony of Russia and not a republic equal to the RSFSR in the former Soviet Union,” as Russian propagandists regularly insist.

But as insightful as these observations are, it is important to have more objective measures of just how and perhaps especially when Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia and Russians have changed. That is now possible because of the rapidly maturing polling sector in Ukraine.

The sociologists reported that the latest surveys show that 60 percent of those questioned said that they were proud to be Ukrainians. Only 16 percent said they were not. Those figures are far higher than in the 1990s, and the situation began to change at the time first of the Orange Revolution and then at that of the Maidan.

The highest figure in this regard – 67 percent – was reached in 2015. It has fallen off somewhat as Ukrainians recognize that the situation they find themselves in is likely to last a long time and be filled with uncertainties, the sociologists say. They also stress that it is significant that 22 percent of those surveyed identify more with a city or village than with the country, but only seven percent with a region more than with Ukraine as a whole.

Yevgeny Golovakha, the deputy director of the Kyiv Institute of Sociology, said at the meeting that Ukrainians today feel hope and only then concern and that now “hope is even more the predominant feeling than was the case in the relati8vely stable and well-off period of the beginning of 2013.”

In that year, 32 percent of Ukrainians said they were hopeful about their country; now 44 percent do. He also noted that ever fewer Ukrainians are interested in any integration with Russia: “Fewer than 20 percent of the respondents” favor that now, and “up to 57 percent” say they are opposed to some kind of hypothetical “’Slavic union’” of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

Irina Bekeshkin, head of the Democratic Initiative Foundation pointed out that this is a reversal of the situation in 1998 when 60 percent of Ukrainians favored such an arrangement. In her view, QHA says, “the decisive role in this shift was played not by the Dignity Revolution but by the aggression of Russia.”

She added that ever more Ukrainians look to integrate with Western institutions like the EU and NATO. A majority now expect their country to be in the EU 20 years from now.And the number of those favoring NATO membership now equals the number opposed, a radical shift even from as recently as 2006.

Ukrainian sociology and polling have suffered from the problems of youth, QHA says, but they are not alone in that. Some of the most distinguished Russian polling agencies also do things that sociologists elsewhere would reject as problematic or worse.

The article gives the example of a recent Levada Center poll which found that 58 percent of Russians are now hostile to Ukraine and only 31 percent are positive as an example of such problems (levada.ru/2016/08/22/vospriyatie-ssha-ukrainy-i-zhitelej-etih-gosudastv/) because the Moscow pollsters asked about Russian attitudes toward Ukraine while also asking about their attitudes toward the US and the EU.

Given that Kremlin outlets insist that “in the Donbass, Russia is fighting not so much with Ukraine as with the entire Western world,” asking the question about Russian attitudes toward Ukraine and Ukrainians is a kind of “manipulation,” something Ukrainian pollsters would be criticized for even if Russian ones aren’t.

Staunton, August 26 – Although the number of people leaving Kazakhstan for permanent residence elsewhere has declined by an order of magnitude over the last 15 years, more than half of those who are leaving are ethnic Russians going to the Russian Federation. But mainly, they are going for personal rather than political reasons, according to Olga Semakova.

In the first decade after the disintegration of the USSR, some 2.5 million people, most of them ethnic Russians, left Kazakhstan. At the end of the 1990s, approximately 300,000 people were leaving each year; now, approximately 30,000 are doing so, a decline equal to an order of magnitude.”

“According to official statistics,” Semakova says, over the last five years, 104,407 ethnic Russians out of a total of 146,052 have left Kazakhstan, while 16,883 ethnic Russians have come to Kazakhstan, out of a total number of arrivals of 123,871. Ethnic Russians thus form 44.5 percent of the total amount of immigration and emigration from the country.

Semakova argues that some 60 percent of ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan do not want to leave while 36 percent say they would like to. That latter figure, however, says little about whether or when they will do so. Fewer than one in five (18 percent) of those who say they want to leave say that they will do so within the next two years.

The ethnic Russians most likely to leave are those with higher educations between the ages of 30 and 49, with those 18 to 29, the prime child-bearing cohort being only slightly less interested in leaving Kazakhstan and moving to the Russian Federation so that their children can grow up in a Russian milieu.

According to Semakova, there are three “blocks” of things pushing people and especially ethnic Russians to leave Kazakhstan. The most important of these are social-economic conditions about jobs and social welfare. Many Russians feel they can’t make a career in Kazakhstan, and most see social welfare conditions in Russia as better.

The next most important are family and personal considerations. Ethnic Russians sometimes want to move to be closer to family members, but the key factor here, Semakova says, involves educational and life chances for their children, chances that ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan assume are better in Russia than where they are now.

The third block, “motives ofpolitical character” including interethnic relations” is much less significant and has an impact an order of magnitude less than the other two on decisions about emigration, the sociologist says.

Staunton, August 26 – Appointments and dismissals of key officials provide insights into how the Kremlin makes decisions more generally because in contrast to other sectors, hirings and firings are almost always carried out, Nikolay Petrov says, adding that the recent wave of changes at the top thus provides a large amount of data on these key aspects of the Putin system.

Both the most recent wave of personnel changes and “the large series of cadres decisions of the last two years look consistent and well thought out, a pattern that testifies at a minimum that they have been taken within the framework of a common logic and from a single center.” And while Putin has the last word, he does not make all these choices independently.

That task is simply too large: “the nomenklatura positions the president appoints have increased sharly” and the number of presidential representatives both formal and informal, including in essence the governors has grown as well.” But Putin sets the direction and the parameters within which all these choices are made.

“The personal participation of the president in the adoption of cadres decisions doesn’t mean one man rule and his absolute independence in taking them,” Petrov says. Various groups in the bureaucracy are involved, and Putin can’t ignore them. Many decisions are thus “the result of a struggle in the apparatus and competition of various groups within the elite.”

Putin is a past master at patience, Petetrov argues. He thinks about cadres appointments for a long time and “tests the reaction to possible appointments on various people from his entourage.” He could dispense with this perhaps, but he has to take various factors into consideration – image, balance, message, and so on – and testing names on others is helpful.

A particular reason he has to do that, the analyst suggests, is that cadres changes at the top involve cadres changes below. When one leader is replace by another, that has consequences for others who have been or will become their subordinates.It is best if this is considered in advance rather than after the fact.

The timing of appointments, Petrov says, can be triggered either by objective external circumstances or by “subjective factors,” including personal relationships.Often people are changed not because of themselves but because of a new direction in overall Kremlin policy in a particular area. “The real goals [involved] typically aren’t announced.”

The only cadres appointments where the process has been specified in law concerns the naming of governors. There the 2004 rules are generally followed but not always, especially if key groups lobby for or against a particular appointment or reappointment directly with the president. Then almost anything can happen.

According to Petrov, the most important change in the cadres process in recent times involves a shift from carrots to sticks. In the past, the Kremlin generally used a system of carrots, offering someone on the way out something else. Now, what has emerged is a system involving sticks “or their absence.”

That increases the likelihood that the system will move in one of two directions in the coming months: either in the direction of “authoritarianism for which a shift to mass repressions regarding cadres will be necessary or toward authoritarian modernization in which cadres will have to bend the knee and adapt.”

Which one will occur, Petrov says, is uncertain, but he suggests that “we should be able to see it already before the end of the year.”

The United States and Russia renewed efforts Friday to negotiate a peaceful end to the fighting in Syria in light of a more volatile and complicated situation with the introduction of Turkish forces on the ground. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrovare meeting in Geneva, trying to come to an agreement over military cooperation and information sharing in a bid to defeat Islamic State militants in Syria - something both sides want. As they took a lunchtime break, Lavrov said the talks on Syria with Kerry were “excellent.” The U.N. envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, who joined the Friday’s closely-watched U.S.-Russia meeting in the early afternoon, said after the break, “We are still working.” As he entered the morning session, Lavrov avoided commenting on a reporter’s question of what was the primary impediment to a cease-fire in Syria, only saying, "I don't want to spoil the atmosphere for the negotiations." Kerry did not make any comments. It was not immediately clear if either man would address reporters after their talks, which include discussions about the crisis in Ukraine. Previous rounds ofinternational negotiations, including discussions between the top diplomats from Washington andMoscow, have failed to produce an end to the conflict in Syria, which is complicated by U.S. and Russian support for oppositesides and has killed more than 290,000 people. The conflict also has forced millions from their homes in more than five years. Heightened regional tensions Kerry's initial plan, unveiled during July talks in Moscow, would have Washington and Moscow coordinate airstrikes against Islamic State fighters and stop the Syrian air force from launching any further air attacks. The latest meeting comes amid heightened tensions in Syria after Turkey decided earlier this week to send tanks across the border into Syria to clear out a pocket of land controlled by the Islamic State group. U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters say they are withdrawing to their bases east of the Euphrates River after Turkey's military and allied fighters launched a cross-border offensive. The Kurdish rebels have been a source of tension between the U.S., which views them as a key ally in the war in Syria, and Turkey, which sees them as terrorists allied with separatist Turkish Kurd factions. A U.S.-led coalition spokesman said the Kurds moved east "to prepare for the eventual liberation of Raqqa." It is unclear, however, if all the Kurdish forces have withdrawn as Turkey had demanded ahead of its offensive. The head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdel Rahman, told Arab media that Kurdish militia fighters are still fighting on the western side of the Euphrates River and had even captured some ground. Turkey's foreign minister said Kerry had spoken with him in a phone call early Thursday and said the Syrian Kurdish forces would withdraw. Vice President Joe Biden this week told Turkey's leaders the Kurds would lose U.S.-support if they did not move back across the Euphrates. Russia's Foreign Ministry expressed deep concern about the Turkish border operation, especially Turkey's targeting of Kurdish militia fighters. It said that Turkey, by targeting both Islamic State militants and Syrian Kurds, could further inflame the Syrian civil war, leading to "flare-ups of inter-ethnic tensions between Kurds and Arabs." Middle East analyst Theodore Karasik told VOA Turkey's military offensive on Syrian territory risks further complicating the war, influencing the shifting alliances among various militia factions that have made it difficult for any one side to dominate the conflict. He says Turkey risks escalating the conflict. Reporter Ed Yeranian contributed from Cairo.

Iran's intelligence minister says security officers have investigated more than 1,500 young men at risk of being recruited by the extremist Islamic State group. The semi-official Tasnim news agency on Friday quoted Mahmoud Alavi as saying that his department has summoned for questioning, detained or talked with the young people to stop them from joining IS. Alavi didn't elaborate but says his officers are closely watching those who show an inclination toward joining the extremist group fighting in Iraq and Syria. In recent months, Iran has executed or killed dozens of extremist Islamic "terrorists'' in clashes in the country's western regions. In June, Iran claimed breaking up one of the "biggest terrorist plots'' ever on its soil by Sunni extremists planning bombings in Tehran and elsewhere.

The Philippine government and the country’s Communist guerrillas have signed an indefinite cease-fire agreement. The truce, signed in Norway Friday, seeks to end one of Asia's longest-running insurgencies. It has claimed the lives of thousands of people. "This is a historic and unprecedented event," said Jesus Dureza, the peace adviser to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Dureza also said, "There is still a lot of work to be done ahead." The two sides have been meeting in Oslo since Monday and will meet again in October. Norwegian Foreign Minister Borge Brende described the deal as a "major breakthrough."

As the United States prepared to invade Taliban-ruled Afghanistan 15 years ago, then-first lady Laura Bush took over her husband's weekly radio address to tell the American people that part of the reason for going to war after the attacks of September 11, 2001, was to liberate Afghan women from the brutality that had been forced on them by the extremists' regime. As the war against the Taliban grinds on, Afghan women are still largely treated as property and barely a week goes by without news emerging of a woman or girl being stoned to death, burned with gasoline, beaten or tortured by her in-laws, traded to repay a debt, jailed for running away from a violent husband, or sold into marriage as a child. Abuse of women in Afghanistan remains entrenched and endemic, despite constitutional guarantees of equality, protection from violence and age-old practices such as trading young women to pay debts. Earlier this month, news emerged from remote central Ghor province of Zarah, a pregnant 14-year-old who was allegedly tortured and set on fire by her in-laws as they took revenge on her father over a failed deal to marry one of their relatives. Mohammad Azam, 45, traveled to the capital, Kabul, to call for justice for the killing of his daughter. Yet he too had taken a young bride as payment for construction work. Rising violence reported The British government said in a report in early July that "documented cases of violence against women have risen'' in the first half of 2016, with 5,132 cases reported to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, "including 241 murders." Attending a small rally in western Kabul to support Azam's call for justice, women's rights activist Veeda Saghari said violence against women is largely ignored by Afghanistan's judicial sector. "That is why all kinds of violence against women such as acid throwing, beating, stoning, informal community tribunal verdicts, burning, forced divorces, forced marriages, forced pregnancies, forced abortions have reached a peak,'' she said. In fairness, much has improved for Afghan women since the Taliban were ejected from power. During five years of Taliban rule, women were not permitted to attend school or work, were largely confined to their homes, and subject to public beatings for violations of strict rules on what they could wear in public. When it came to their health, very few had access to doctors, and benchmarks such as maternal mortality were among the worst in the world. Now millions of girls go to school, compared to practically none in 2001, and access to health care is widespread. The constitution protects women from the worst excesses they suffered before 2001. Figures published by the World Bank show a drop in maternal mortality, for instance, from 1,340 per 100,000 live births in 1990 to 396 in 2015. Many women work for the government and security services, run their own businesses, and are elected to parliament. Figures from President Ashraf Ghani's office show 33 percent of all teachers are women, and there are 240 women judges. He has nominated four women as Cabinet ministers, appointed seven as deputy ministers and four as ambassadors. Struggles continue Yet for most Afghan women, the struggles of today are little different to those under the Taliban. Many working women are targeted and often killed by extremists. High-profile lawmaker Shukria Barakzai, who ran a secret school for girls during the Taliban era, survived a suicide bomb attack in 2014, and was appointed ambassador to Norway last year. But in impoverished and rural areas, girls can often be of less value to their families than their animals. A burns unit in the western city of Herat has a ward dedicated to treating young women who set themselves on fire, as much a cry for help as a suicide attempt. Women's prisons in major cities, including Kabul, hold hundreds of women accused of adultery for having sex outside marriage, as well as young women who have run away from home to escape arranged marriages or abusive, often much older, husbands. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the executive director of U.N. Women, has found that government officials, judges, clerics and educators are often receptive to the concepts of women's rights, as enshrined in the Afghan constitution. But, she said, "When we are dealing with extremism, there is pushback. Every step of the way, there is pushback.'' Resisting forced values Following the fall of the Taliban, the Western push for women's rights led some Afghans to feel that Western values were being forced on them, she said, and that had led to problems of acceptance of women's rights as homegrown. The situation is complicated by almost 40 years of conflict. "We have a generation that has only known war, and at the same time you also have a generation that has been educated, that knows about the lives that are lived by people in other parts of the world. There has to be some confusion as people try to deal with all these issues,'' Mlambo-Ngcuka said, adding: "So the glass is half full.'' That doesn't mean Afghanistan should be given special treatment, she said. "Rape is rape, physical violence is physical violence. So in our quest not to be overbearing and not to overshadow local efforts, I don't think that we should also move away and not talk about the universality of rights," she said. As a member of the United Nations and signatory to the "same charters as all the other member states, we have to hold them to the same standards because the nation has actually signed on to the same value system as the other nations," she said. "What is good for a child in Europe in terms of protection, in terms of making sure that they have a right to education, not to be married early – that is good for a child in Europe and it is good for a child in Afghanistan.''

Syrian government buses on Friday began evacuating the first of 4,000 civilians and rebel fighters from the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Daraya. Fighters reportedly will be allowed to leave for rebel-held Idlib province, near the Turkish border, based on a deal reached with government representatives Thursday. Syrian state TV showed live footage of the first green government bus leaving the besieged suburb. Several bearded rebel fighters could be seen in the bus, alongside their families. A Syrian army colonel overseeing the operation told journalists that it was proceeding smoothly and that he hoped it would be a precursor to similar actions. He said the first batch of 300 rebel fighters, whom he called "terrorists", were being evacuated to the rebel-held province of Idlib. He added that some civilians who wish to remain in the Damascus area would be allowed to do so. Syrian media reported that approximately 4,000 remaining residents of Daraya – under government siege since 2012 – would leave the area under a deal. A quarter-million people lived in the suburb before the Syrian conflict broke out in 2011. Preparations observed Amateur video taken by opposition activists inside Daraya showed women dressed in black veils surrounded by children preparing to leave. Young men in military fatigues also milled around the heavily damaged buildings surrounded by piles of rubble. Convoys of four-wheel-drive vehicles and ambulances belonging to the Syrian Red Crescent organization also took part in the operation to evacuate the wounded and a number of dead government troops. Syrian state media reported that some of the fighters being evacuated had agreed to surrender to the government and accept an official amnesty. VOA could not independently confirm the claim. Four-day operation planned Pro-Syrian government al-Mayadeen TV reported that 45 government buses would participate in what it called a four-day operation to evacuate all remaining individuals from Daraya. It reported that other Damascus suburbs may soon participate in similar evacuation operations. Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV, which supports the rebels, reported that more than 3,000 people have been killed in Daraya since it came under government siege in 2012.

The Correspondents is VOA’s weekly discussion of the world’s top stories, as seen through the eyes of our dedicated reporters in the US and around the globe. Hosted by Mil Arcega, our panel of journalists goes beyond the headlines to give listeners and viewer real context and understanding of what’s driving the story.

Russian media outlets on Thursday quoted U.S. Republican party presidential candidate Donald Trump as harshly criticizing the International Paralympic Committee’s decision to ban Russian athletes from the 2016 Paralympics, which will be held in Rio de Janeiro starting on September 7. The problem is that these comments attributed to Trump appear to have been made up. Citing the British Broadcasting Corporation, several dozen Russian newspapers, TV channels and radio stations quoted Trump as saying that the decision to bar Russian athletes from the Paralympics was made by “complete idiots who are the real disabled people.” Trump was further quoted as saying: “How else to explain the fact that athletes from Russia, where there were scandals involving doping, were at the Olympic games in Rio, but that all the Russian Paralympic athletes, who were not connected with doping scandals, will not be there? To work off their own uselessness on disabled people from Russia, strong of body and spirit – is this not mean and low?” Had Donald Trump made such a statement, it would have been big news in his presidential campaign. So, VOA’s Russian Service asked the Interfax news agency, which had also quoted the putative Trump comment and attributed it to the BBC, for comment. VOA also asked the BBC about it. ‘Released by mistake’ Shortly after being contacted by VOA, Interfax withdrew its report on the alleged Trump quote, saying it had been “released by mistake” and apologizing to subscribers. A short time later, BBC’s press service, in response to VOA’s inquiry, confirmed that it had not published any report claiming to quote Donald Trump criticizing those who banned Russian athletes from participating in the upcoming Paralympics in Rio. An Internet search found that the first reference to the alleged BBC report appeared on August 23 on a website which, in the past, had posted news reports that turned out to be fictional. Still, the Trump “quote” quickly spread across the Russian Internet after it was reported Thursday by the popular Russian sports portal Sovsport. In addition to major outlets, the alleged Trump quote was reported by the Russian government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta and by Parlamentskaya Gazeta, which is published by the Russian parliament. The former attributed the quote to “News reports,” the latter – to the BBC. The quote was welcomed by Russian netizens with comments like "Bravo, Trump!", "Well done, Trump!", "I like Trump more and more, and on this issue he is totally great!", and even "a word of truth from America!" After Interfax withdrew its report, Russian media outlets, one by one, followed suite, telling their readers they had been the victims of a fraud perpetrated by “internet pranksters.” Still, some outlets left the quote standing, among them the government’s Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Later Thursday evening, it did publish a separate report acknowledging that the story “could have been fake.” Parlamentskaya Gazeta also left the story up but without any immediate corrections or disclaimers.

Chinese Cyber Attacks on Russia Nearly TripleNewsweek
Despite numerous reports of Russian cyberattacks on the West in the last year, the country is also the target of plenty of hack attempts itself—from China, Bloomberg reports. Politically China and Russia have moved closer, as Moscow seeks to fill the ...and more »

Beyond potential political allegiances and personal phobias, we should ask ourselves how serious is the alleged academic plagiarism attributed to President Enrique Peña Nieto by Carmen Aristegui.

According to the report presented by the journalist last Sunday on her website, the chief executive of the state plagiarized at least ten authors in his thesis “Mexican presidentialism and Alvaro Obregón” which he presented at the Pan American University for the completion of his bachelor's degree in Law.

The increasing opacity of Russian politics has opened a window of opportunity for Kremlinology to make a comeback. Many people ridicule the field of study as little more than reading tea leaves, but it can be a helpful analytical tool when done properly.

: “The art of observing, deducing, and guessing what is really happening within a secretive organization.”

I see Kremlinology as the formalized study of hard facts in a closed society, observing appointments, organization, decrees, and formal speeches. Kremlinology has no role in an open society, but Russia today is no open society, though it is far from Soviet. The Kremlin offers plenty of information today, notably through President Vladimir Putin’s magnificent website, of which Steve Lee Myers has made eminent use in his book

In Stalin’s time, the world usually learned about ousters from the semiannual reviews at the Lenin Mausoleum on November 7 and May 1; Soviet newspapers published photos of the whole party elite on these occasions, providing a meticulous documentation of their ranking. Wondering how it was done, I attended an official reception of Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov in 1987. When Ryzhkov arrived, the senior officials swiftly arranged themselves into their correct protocol positions. Protocol matters in closed hierarchical states, which Kremlinology utilizes.

Today, the Kremlin publishes multiple photos from top-level meetings, and it matters who attends and where they sit. When Putin gathered his Economic Council on May 25, liberal Alexei Kudrin sat far down the table, in a lower spot than hardline adviser Sergei Glaziev. Thus, Kudrin was getting nowhere. No Western journalist noted that fact at the time. Since December 2011, Ivanov always sat closest to Putin, showing that he was number two in the Kremlin, a fact which was also ignored.

A common view is that Putin is a full-fledged dictator, but that is a simplistic view. It matters which bodies are important and how they interact. At present, the Security Council is the real Politburo, the most senior body that meets regularly in a small closed circle chaired by Putin.

Stunningly, Putin does not control its composition. On April 5, he appointed his favorite former chief bodyguard General Viktor Zolotov, the newly-appointed commander of the new powerful National Guard, as a permanent member of the Security Council, but on April 11 another presidential decree demoted him to a mere member, of whom there are dozens, telling us that Putin was unable to defend him.

After Ivanov had been sacked as Chief of Staff, he stayed on the Security Council. Putin only removed the long-retired Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev from the Security Council and replaced him with his new Chief of Staff Anton Vaino. Thus, by means of Kremlinology—by studying organizations and appointments and not relying on any “inside” information—we could surmise that the Security Council could oust Putin.

Since April, Russia has seen a major rivalry between the country’s many security services through reorganizations and well-publicized arrests of high-level officials. One side is the FSB, the bulk of the old KGB, and the SVR (the foreign intelligence agency), while their opponents are the FSO (the Presidential Guard), the New National Guard, and Putin’s favorite Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov. The Ministry of Defense may be an independent player.

Through his radical reorganizations, Putin has showed his preference for the FSO, the National Guard, and Kadyrov. But the opposite, FSB side dominates the 12-member Security Council: Ivanov, National Security Secretary Nikolay Patrushev, FSB Chair Alexander Bortnikov, and SVR chief Mikhail Fradkov. Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev must not like getting his best parts taken away, and Duma Speaker Sergey Naryshkin is identified with the other KGB generals.

Putin needs to change either the composition of the Security Council fast or make it unimportant, as Mikhail Gorbachev did with the Politburo. Otherwise Putin will sooner or later be ousted. As Talleyrand stated: “You can do anything you like with bayonets except to sit on them.” The Security Council should be front and center in current analysis of Russian politics, but analysts tend to ignore it.

What we ought to be ignoring, rather, is the official propaganda. On August 11, both Ivanov and Putin said that Ivanov had asked to leave after four years. Really? It was as obvious a lie as when Putin in September 2011 claimed that he and Medvedev had agreed four years earlier that Putin would return as President. The sacking of Ivanov came as a complete surprise to all, apart from us Kremlinologists, who saw this serious tension at the heart of the Kremlin, which became evident at the time of the murder of Boris Nemtsov at the Kremlin wall on February 27, 2015.

Similarly, we ought to ignore the more or less official Kremlin propagandists. They are only interesting as generators of Kremlin disinformation. Remember how the Brezhnev Kremlin warned about hardliners who would take over if he were ousted, or how nice a liberal reformer Yuriy Andropov was?

In this week’s Western media highlights, Anders Åslund explains in the American Interest that the West needs to revive Kremlinology, a Soviet-era analytical approach to deciphering and understanding the opaque practices of Russian politics. Meanwhile, in the Russian media, Vladislav Inozemtsev argues that despite the popular view, Russia’s “lost decade” is not the current one, but was instead the first ten years under Putin’s rule. And sociologist Aleksei Levinson writes that state television does not control the Russian public mind; in fact, it’s the Russian people who choose self-censorship.

May must explain Tory donor's links to Russia, says Labour MPThe Guardian
Rise Capital lists as partners three Russian banks that had sanctions imposed on them by the US and EU in 2014 in the wake of the Ukraine crisis. Sergei Romashov, the managing partner of Rise Capital, is understood to be close to Russia's president, ...

Several issues resolved during John Kerry meeting with Sergei Lavrov, but parties fail to reach comprehensive agreement

A ceasefire in Syria is drawing closer after the US and Russia held diplomatic talks, but a final deal has yet to be reached, according to reports.

A number of issues blocking the restoration of a nationwide truce and wider aid deliveries were resolved at the 10-hour meeting in Geneva, but the US secretary of state, John Kerry, and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, fell short of a comprehensive agreement.

Turkish warplanes hit the positions of U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in northern Syria on August 27, days after Ankara launched a major operation to clear the region of Islamic State (IS) militants and Syrian Kurdish forces.

A fire in a warehouse at a Moscow printing facility killed at least 16 people on Saturday morning, an Emergencies Ministry official told Rossiya-24 TV station. "Sixteen bodies were found in a room, four injured were brought to hospitals in Moscow. The fire was completely put out by 9:53 am (6:53 UTC)," he said. The ministry said on its website that 12 people were rescued. The TV station said the people, who lived and worked at the depot, were mostly from former Soviet Union countries. The reason for the fire has not immediately been disclosed. Lax fire safety standards have often been blamed for such incidents in Russia.